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Swedish utility company Vattenfall’s pilot CO2 Carbon dioxide - capture power plant project is a 30 MW Oxyfuel pilot plant near Berlin, Germany

In September 2008 Vattenfall inaugurating the world´s first pilot for a power plant with CO2-capture. The pilot plant based in Schwarze Pumpe (State of Brandenburg) will demonstrate the whole chain on Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS) for the first time.

With an investment of roundabout 70 Million euros the pilot plant will have a planned three-year test phase that is embedded in European research projects. The engineers will mainly concentrate on optimising the oxyfuel-technology within the plants´ components. It is the first time ever that the technology will work in a completed CCS-chain – a storage facility for the CO2 produced in this 30-Megawatt-plant was found in the region of Altmark in Northern Germany. Together with the partner Gaz de France, Vattenfall has set up a pilot project for storing CO2 in a depleted natural gas field.

How does it work ?

The electricity power plant burns damp, crumbling brown coal known as lignite, which is even more polluting than the harder black anthracite which most of us are used to, burning it in the presence of pure oxygen, releases both water vapour and carbon dioxide ( CO2). The plant condenses the water in a pipe, from which they then capture and isolate 95 percent of the CO2 in a 99.7 percent pure form and store it.

Coal burning is responsible for 40% of the worlds 30 billion metric tons of C02 emitted by human activity each year.

Countries such as China have begun to reopen old mines to supply new and existing coal fired power stations in order to keep up supply for its rapidly expanding population.

Schwarze Pumpe power plant in Germany - oxyfuel combustion chamber being lifted in to place - September 2007

What happens to the stored Carbon Dioxide (CO2) ?

The CO2 is the compressed into a liquid to be used by carbonated beverages, such as Coca-Cola and oil companies that use it to flush more petroleum out of declining deposits. Other uses include the manufactures of fire extinguishers  dry ice used in staged special effects for example.

What other technologies exist to capture CO2 ?

Today three types of technology can capture CO2 at a power plant. One, as at Schwarze Pumpe, involves the oxyfuel process: burning coal in pure oxygen to produce a stream of CO2-rich emissions. The second uses various forms of chemistry—in the form of amine scrubbers, special membranes or ionic liquids—to pull carbon dioxide out of a more mixed set of exhaust gases. The third is gasification, in which liquid or solid fuels are first turned into synthetic natural gas; CO2 from the conversion of the gas can be siphoned off.

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Can the extracted Carbon dioxide be stored away indefinitely ?

Norwegian oil company statoilHydro has been stripping CO2 out of natural gas since 1996, from the Sleipner oil field in the North Sea and rather than venting it to the atmosphere has been pumping it back into the field 1,000 meters deep for permanent storage. The same Utsira sandstone formation that stored the natural gas for millions of years can be exploited to trap and store CO2, explains Olav Kaarstad, CCS adviser to Statoil. The 250-meter-thick band of sandstone-porous, crumbly rock that traps the gas in the minute spaces between particles-is topped by a relatively impermeable 200 meter thick layer of shale and mudstone, equivalent to thick hardened clay.

Statoil have injected 12 million metric tons of CO2 into the formation, which is monitored through periodic seismic tests similar to sonogram through the earth. Monitoring indicates that since 1996, the liquid Carbon Dioxide has spread out as a thin layer permeating a three kilometer square expanse of sandstone, just 0.0001 percent of the area available for CO2 storage.

The storage seems to be successful over the long term too; because the sequestrated gas dissolves into the brine that share the pore space and over even longer periods, forms carbonate minerals with surrounding rock.

Statoil recently began another CO2 injection program at the Snohvit natural gas field in the Barents Sea, which has required a 150 kilometre pipeline to be built on the sea bed to pump CO2 to where it can be sequestrated. Since 2004 oil firm BP and it partners including Statoil have been stripping the nine billion cubic metres of natural gas taken from the In Salah gas field in Algeria, of the 10 percent carbon dioxide it contains and pumping it back into the underlying Saline aquifer through three additional wells.

The Norwegian governments tax of roughly £32.00 per metric ton inspired the Carbon Dioxide sequestration. The technology costs a fraction of the tax say Statoil, “we are actually making money out of this”.

Are Vatenfall, in Germany the first to extract C02 ?

Some U.S. utilities have already built or upgraded plants to capture CO2, which they either store or sell. The 180-MW Warrior Run coal-fired power plant in Cumberland, Md., already captures 96 percent of its CO2 emissions to sell for use as a fire extinguisher or dry ice. The Kingsport power plant in Kingsport, Tenn., has been capturing CO2 since 1984 to sell to carbonated beverage makers.

Since 1996, the Norwegian oil company statoilHydro has been stripping CO2 out of natural gas from the Sleipner oil field in the North Sea and rather than venting it to the atmosphere has been pumping it back into the field 1,000 meters deep for permanent storage.

Australia and China have demonstrated that post-combustion capture is possible in pilot plants. At Loy Yang Power Station in Victoria, a pilot plant run by Australia's Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization (CSIRO) will capture 1,000 metric tons of CO2 a year; the Australian research organization has also collaborated with China's Huaneng Group to use an amine scrubber to capture CO2 from a co-generation power plant in Beijing and then sell it.

Although multiple projects around the world examine or test aspects of CCS, few of them have been connected to a full-size power plant: one producing on average 500 MW and upward of 10,000 metric tons of carbon dioxide a day—the core of the emissions problem. And the few that have been are either venting the CO2 after capturing it or selling it, instead of taking the next step and storing the greenhouse gas underground.

"It makes nine metric tons of CO2 per hour at full load," says Staffan Gortz, Vattenfall's CCS spokesman, of the $100-million CCS demonstration boiler at Schwarze Pumpe. But he acknowledges that "we don't have a storage site yet."

What is Carbon dioxide ( CO2) capture and sequestration ?

If carbon capture schemes (CCS) are deployed on a much larger scale to deal with the planets CO2 problem, then society will need the expertise of the oil industry.

Scottish Centre for Carbon Storage.